C-Store cheerleader photo, from the University Archives

If you’ve been in the DeNaples C-Store lately (or as it’s now officially known, the P.O.D. Market), you might have seen this “cheerful” photo behind the counter:

Front row: Tom O’Neill and Chris Zoeller. Back row: Herbert Lebovits, Joseph Molasky, and Jack McHale.

This photo from 1952 comes from the Weinberg Memorial Library’s University Archives, where it’s safely preserved for posterity in an acid-free folder.  In 2009, we digitized the Archives’ whole set of football-related photographs and made it available online in our digital Football Collection.  We recently just posted this photo to our Flickr account as part of a sample from the collection, to help users find us:

We here at the Library are proud to help our students get to know the University’s history.  After all, according to one of our favorite archived University fight songs,  “Today we’re Royals in the game, / Tomorrow we’re Royals in the world! We’re Royals, Royals, Royals!!”

New Digital Collections Home Page

It’s been a long time coming, but our new Digital Collections home page is finally up and running!  On this new page, you can find a list of all of our digital collections, from the popular Aquinas Online to our lesser known set of digitized Northeastern Pennsylvania history books housed on Internet Archive. You can also cross search several of our collections, including the University of Scranton Digital Yearbook Collection and the just-released Football Collection.  The page also features information about our collections and notes about what we’re working on next (we’re especially excited about the Electronic Masters and Honors Theses).  We’ll soon be adding an online form that you can use to request your own copies of digital images from our collections.

As with most of our projects, the Digital Collections home page is a work in progress – so please let us know if you have suggestions or comments!

Note: Big, huge thanks to Library Systems Specialist Jen Maher for her work on the new pages.

UofS Football Archives now online

The University of Scranton’s football team may no longer be around (in fact, it’s famous on campus for being “undefeated since 1960”), but at the Weinberg Memorial Library, UofS football is back in a big way.  This week, the Library is proud to announce the University of Scranton Football Collection, a digitized version of our football archives.

The collection includes over a thousand photographs of University of Scranton (and St. Thomas College) football teams, players, coaches, and games – as well as photos of the cheerleaders and marching bands who cheered them on.  The collection also features a set of football game programs.  The programs, produced for each home game, have team rosters, statistics, and game analysis.  Most of the materials come from the years 1900 through 1960, when the varsity football team was disbanded.

This collection isn’t just for UofS football fans, though.  The game programs in particular are a rich resource for researchers interested in the history of Scranton and its surrounding area.  The programs were sponsored by local businesses (like the Hotel Casey), so the booklets serve as miniature “time capsules” showing slices of Scranton life over time.

We invite all students, staff, alumni, and community members to browse and search the collection at www.scranton.edu/library/football.  You may also want to take a look at our brief history of University of Scranton football.

P.S. While we have identified many of the photographs, some are still mysteries.  If you recognize a player, please let us know!

Many thanks to librarian Kay Lopez, library systems specialist Jennifer Maher, and digital services assistant Kevin Pheasey, who all dedicated many hours of hard work to this project.